An Introduction to

Where did Fedora come from?

Boxed set every 6 months == Failed business model [ ] [ In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux ]

18 month support cycle == No time for ISVs to build products == Failed business model [ ] [ In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux ]

Selling beta products to customers == Failed business model [ ] [ In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux ]

[ Fedora | RHEL ] don’t sell it | sell it 6 month release | 18 month release no paid support | 5 year minimum support new cool stuff | old boring stuff community driven | company driven

What is Fedora today?

[ 300,000 Fedora boxes checked in for updates last week. ]

lab rules: If you do it, do it in public. Make it new, but make it work. Fail, learn, and repeat. As quickly as possible! [ A lab for open source development ]

Fedora 9 has over 5,500 source packages. Documentation (release notes, howtos, wiki). Translation (80+ languages). Worldwide ambassadors and marketing. Worldwide volunteer prod-ops and infrastructure team. Artwork and websites. Quality assurance and bug triage. Building more ways to work together. [ A set of projects ]

Free as in speech, Free as in beer. Today, tomorrow, and always. [ A promise ]

[ A concept ]

Who is Fedora?

irc mailing lists hosted projects bugzilla community sites wiki [ A community of users and developers ]

Fedora Project Board 5 elected members 4 appointed members 1 chairman Real power to the real community. [ A governance model ]

Why does Fedora matter?

The Thesis If we do not invest in the ability to harness the ideas of the community, then we incur all of the costs of proprietary software without gaining the primary benefit of free software.

The Thesis If we do not invest in the ability to harness the ideas of the community, then we incur all of the costs of proprietary software without gaining the primary benefit of free software. “I wish I could download my own custom version of Fedora from a website.” “I wish I could use all of these old computers in our school's classrooms.” “I wish I could carry my entire computer with me on a single USB key.” “I wish I had the power to fix this simple bug in Thunderbird.” “I wish someone would fix the bug I filed six months ago.” “I wish I could just run this one command on every system in the company and get the results in a simple list.” “I wish they'd teach how open source works at my university.”

There are always more bugs to fix. There are always new tools to write. There are always new projects to start. Work in the community and build your name. [ Limitless opportunity ]

Get Fedora for free. Poke it, prod it, use it, share it. Be curious. [ First you play ]

“How do I see s from my girlfriend first?” “How to I hook a web server to a database?” “Can I write a script to do this? Or that?” “Wow, there are actually cool games on Linux!” The internet changes everything. [ Then you learn ]

“I set up a wiki server for my company.” “I built a backup system for my lab at school.” “I wrote a script to hockey scores to my phone.” The more you do, the more there is to do. [ Then you do ]

“Network manager keeps losing my key. How do I file a bug?” “I'm working on a spelling game for my nephew. How do I share it with others?” “I made my own Fedora Live CD – let me show everyone how I did it!” [ Then you give back ]

“Here's why open source is better.” “Yeah, that's broken. Here's how to file a bug.” “Your rpm doesn't build properly. Here's a fix.” [ Then you teach ]

Users of OSS (Good!) Googlers Bug reporters (Better!) Patchers Maintainers (Best!)

You are the leaders we are looking for. [ You're free, now go and help the others ]